Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  “You mean, they have gone off the deep end compared to people who build two-hundred-foot-tall flaming crosses next to the Applebee’s!?” Sophia asked.

  “Yeah,” Pete said, laconic for once, allowing Sophia’s imagination to have her way in the ensuing silence. “So believe it or not he knows people through ONE who are actually willing to go into places like that and have conversations with the people there.”

  “Or exchange words with them at any rate,” said Sophia, recalling the Red Card.

  “Point being,” Pete said, “one of those people is across the river at the moment, not that far away, and Jake called me last night to say that they had lost contact with this individual and that they have drone video suggesting that he might be in serious trouble. He asked me if I might consider going across the river today and in a peaceable and neighborly way trying to sort things out.”

  “You control more money than the Roman Empire at its peak,” Sophia reminded him.

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t you have people for this?”

  “At times like this, the ‘Ameristan’ label becomes more than just a clever bit of wordplay,” Pete said. “Think Afghanistan or Pakistan. How does it work there? They have warlords. The warlords are big men, respected just because they are big men. If the big man shows up to a parley, it’s a gesture of respect and it helps to calm things down. If the big man sends a lackey, it can . . . have the opposite effect.”

  Pete Borglund, warlord. It was such a bizarre juxtaposition that it shut Sophia up for a little while. He turned his attention back to Tom. “We pretty much have to go to Sioux City anyway, because of where the bridges are.”

  “We could pay someone to ferry us over,” Tom pointed out.

  “I don’t want to mess around with those ferry guys. Too sketchy for me. I’m a fan of bridges.”

  “Okay. Bridges it is.”

  “That works out great for these guys,” Pete said, nodding at Sophia and waving at the Land Cruiser. “Sophia and her crew can hand the LC back over to you guys and jump back into the car they sent ahead. Then we can use the LC as part of our caravan across the river.”

  Tom nodded. Sophia didn’t. Pete’s plan made perfect sense. But now she had this feeling of people going on an adventure to which she clearly was not invited.

  “If sending a warlord is a gesture of respect,” she said, “isn’t it even more respectful to send a warlady too?”

  The warlady insisted on swapping places with one of the lackeys in Pete’s SUV who was qualified to take her place behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. She didn’t even want to think about what the conversation was like in that vehicle. But here in Pete’s SUV, the topic was the wild tribes across the river and their practices.

  The two-laner they’d been following westward T’d into the interstate highway that ran north along the east bank of the Missouri for some miles up to Sioux City. In most of the country, being on an interstate meant that you were in sane and settled territory—it was the network that linked the reality-based nodes of society. The vacancies between—the interstices between the intersections, as Dr. Johnson would have it—were the domain of the fantasists, subsisting on an intoxicating mélange of homemade pharmaceuticals and hallucinatory memes.

  Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. It was not a way to live long or to prosper, but it was a way of being as ineradicable, now, as the ragweed that flourished in the roadside ditches. The people of those interstitial spaces had as free access to the interstate highway system as the reality-based drivers commuting between Omaha and Sioux City, and so it was that the sleek electric cars, gliding along under autopilot at exactly the speed limit, served as traffic cones for the careening human-piloted ethanol-burning behemoths of the Ameristanis. By and large the latter tended to go either much faster than the speed limit (when paying attention) or much slower (when staring at screens or lost in AR goggles), and so they either wove slalom courses around the smart cars or else gave the latter’s algorithms a stiff workout by forcing them to brake and plot courses around distracted slowpokes. Their little warlord caravan was neither one nor the other; human piloted, but by humans who were actually good drivers.

  To see a Tactical on an interstate was not normal. The usual practice would have been for Tom and Kevin to dismount the machine gun from the tripod, or at least throw a tarp over it. But they’d specifically said, back in Des Moines, that it was needed for the last few miles of the journey—this part right along the Missouri River, with Nebraska in plain view off to the left. So Sophia, riding shotgun, couldn’t help gazing off in that direction, scanning the opposite bank of the great river for—what? What could be over there that would create a need for such precautions? They were still in flat Midwestern country. The river ran sluggish and brown between gentle banks for the most part, with no dramatic gorge to be gazed across. Much of the time she couldn’t see anything except trees between the road and the riverbank. When she could look across, she saw mostly trailers, parked in clusters and compounds on the floodplain opposite, with boats of various descriptions strewn around on the muddy banks. Kind of an extremely spread-out linear slum, then, that somehow derived sustenance from the river. Barges moved up and down that, using it as cars used the interstate: a way of getting between more prosperous places.

  “They’d be river pirates if they weren’t so hopelessly outgunned,” Pete explained, noting her interest. “But they can still hole up in the tall grass and snipe at river traffic from half a mile away. So there’s an understanding in place. A protection-money kind of thing. The watermen buy trinkets or eggs or just fork over money as an out-and-out payoff. The people over there refrain from sending high-velocity rounds their way.”

  “Do they ever cross the river?”

  “When they get desperate or some meme convinces them it’s a good idea. They follow these weird edit streams. No one knows where they come from. I looked at one of them once. I thought it would be conspiracy-theory stuff but it wasn’t even coherent enough to be called that.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I guess the whole point of a conspiracy theory is to offer a kind of false coherence.”

  “That’s right, Sophia, but what I saw didn’t even rise to that standard—didn’t even know about it. It was—well, just plain weird. Algorithmically generated mishmash images, sounds . . . no sense to it at all. Just whatever worked, you know, in the sense of getting the viewer to watch a little more. They use eye tracking, you don’t even have to click. But every so often, whoever’s behind it—whoever generates these edit streams, assuming, that is, that there’s a human anywhere in that loop—will put it into the minds of those people, and then bad things can happen.” Pete glanced at the Tactical as if to add, But not to us.

  Sophia now finally cottoned on to something, which was that she and Pete had been having the same conversation the whole time. She wanted to join him on his foray across the river. He was basically opposed to it. But the Midwestern style was indirect and passive-aggressive. So instead of saying no he and the other men in the SUV were just trying to scare the crap out of her. Or—another way of putting it—to make sure she knew what she was playing at.

  That stretch of the drive wasn’t long, and soon they were in the liminal zone outside of Sioux City where the vehicles of the Ameristanis began to peel off as if the city were emanating a repulsive force field only they could sense. They made a few moments’ detour through a Walmart parking lot, where Kevin threw a blue tarp over the machine gun so that they could pass through the city proper without offending local norms. The opposite bank of the river was visible here as the stream was circumventing a line of bluffs. Atop them, posted where it would be conspicuous to people who, like Sophia, were looking across the river, was the occasional religious site. The pe
ople over there had erected crosses, singly or in little clusters. Not huge ones like the flaming cross of the Leviticans, but more folk-art productions that looked like they’d been knocked together in a couple of hours from tree trunks or four-by-fours. Their simple lines were cluttered and complicated by stuff hanging off them. Sophia made sense of it as follows: These people were akin to the Leviticans they’d seen yesterday, but they didn’t have the money or organizational acumen to make natural-gas-fueled crosses out of structural steel. So they built them out of whatever they could scrape together in the way of lumber, wrapped them in rags, soaked them in fuel, and burned them at night.

  Traffic across the bridge was limited to one vehicle at a time because it had been structurally weakened by tens of thousands of bullet impacts. Driven by the inscrutable algorithmically generated memes that dominated their edit streams, locals would from time to time gather on the opposite bank to empty mag after mag of 5.56-millimeter rounds into the underpinnings of the local infrastructure. As Pete put it, “Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets.’”

  In some sections of the bridge, where there was overhead steelwork, they could see the circular impact craters, so closely spaced that they merged into one another and gave the steel a hand-forged patina, as if blacksmiths had gone over every inch of it with ball-peen hammers. But most of the steel, and most of the damage, was under the bridge deck. Anyway the civic authorities on this side of the river had erected a guardhouse at the base of the ramp that led to the bridge and piled dirt behind it to stop any rounds coming across the river. A man in a bulletproof vest was posted there whose job was to space out the traffic so that only one vehicle was on the span at a time. Though he seemed to have a secondary function as well, which was to chat with the occupants of each vehicle and make sure they knew what they were getting into, and were not just tourists being horribly misled by Google Maps.

  The car they’d parted ways with in Des Moines had tracked them down on the riverbank, not before putting itself through a mostly automatic car wash and recharging its battery somewhere, and so Julian and Phil and Anne-Solenne were able to transfer their overnight bags into the back of it and clamber into its freshly vacuumed and wiped-down interior. There was a note on the driver’s seat from Ahmed, the valet who had performed those parts of the detailing not yet deemed suitable for robots, in which he beseeched them to favor him with a tip if the quality of his work had exceeded expectations. Phil did so by staring at the note and muttering. The others climbed in and looked expectantly at Sophia, which was when she broke the news to them.

  They did not have a clear fix on their destination at the time they crossed over the bridge, one at a time, waiting on the far side for the caravan to reassemble. The Tactical went over first, and Kevin made use of the wait to shrug on a flak jacket and a helmet.

  They waited. Flanked by two armed Pete-minions, Sophia took a stroll through a sort of open-air bazaar that had formed around the western approach to the bridge. It comprised about half a dozen RVs, pretty clearly no longer capable of movement, bedecked with blue tarp awnings lashed down against prairie winds by straining ropes attached to concrete-filled tires. Bulletproof panels, held down by rocks and cinder blocks, covered the roofs and were leaned against west-facing surfaces. On plastic folding tables, vendors had put out for display a range of goods produced on the east side of the river: diapers, hardware, snack foods, motor oil. The commerce seemed to be one-way; nothing was being produced in Ameristan that was desired outside of it. Zula, Sophia’s mother, had spoken once about the way that Midwestern farmers had slowly, over generations, beggared themselves by producing commodities. She and Jake had gone in together on a few business ventures intended to create distinct local brands that, like the various cheeses of France, might fetch higher prices in coastal grocery stores: producing pancetta instead of bacon, and so on. But chemistry was chemistry. Ethanol was ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup was high-fructose corn syrup, and so on. So economic competition here was a war of all against all, and the only winners were people in cities who wanted to buy that stuff for as little money as possible.

  A lot of people around here were evidently running some kind of drone-detecting app, because when a drone came in—which happened every few minutes—they all turned to look at it long before it could be seen or heard by Sophia. Glasses couldn’t do that on their own, so the apps must have been networked into other drones, or something, whose sole purpose was to detect drones. Most of them were beefy cargo carriers, capable of hauling a couple of bags of groceries, apparently dispatched to pick up orders at the bazaar. But half an hour after they’d crossed the bridge, a smaller one came in, made a couple of quick orbits around the area, and then came in for a landing on the hood of Pete’s SUV. Zip-tied to it was a mobile phone of a type that had been ubiquitous when Sophia was born. Pete unfolded a pocket tool and snipped it free. The drone flew away. Presently a call came in and Pete, listening, began nodding and waving his free hand in a way that set everyone into motion. More flak jackets and helmets were pulled from the back of the SUV.

  “These precautions seem like too much and too little at the same time,” Sophia remarked as she was shrugging one on. “I mean, this is great if someone just shoots at us with a gun. But what about IEDs? Mortars?”

  “Those would obliterate us,” said Eric, her second cousin once removed. He was studying aerospace engineering at Iowa State, home for the summer.

  “So . . . ?” She climbed into a second-row seat of the SUV.

  “Drone and satellite coverage is good enough to warn us of any IED-type shenanigans. And they just don’t have artillery, other than some homemade crap.”

  “It’s not an actual military,” said her great-uncle Bob, twisting around from the front seat where he was, literally, riding shotgun. “If you were setting up a real military, here’s what you wouldn’t do: you wouldn’t issue every single guy his own collection of fifty-seven different small arms and an infinite quantity of ammunition and nothing else.”

  “Got it,” Sophia said.

  “Pipe down,” said Pete, who was climbing in next to Sophia in what she guessed was the approved Warlord Position: right side of the middle row. He was in communication with someone important and desirous of a little more solemnity. So the vehicle became silent except for Pete’s making sporadic utterances in response to tinny bursts that they could vaguely overhear but not understand.

  “No. No. Yes. Yes, we have all of the stuff on the list—like I told the other guy ten minutes ago, and the guy before him. Jeff. All of it. Yes, we have all of it. The Wet Wipes. Metric Allen wrenches. I need you to send me a picture of our guy just for confirmation. Yes, I understand he has seen better days. I know what you did to him. I am not going to freak out. Just anything that confirms he is still alive. It’s about respect, you know? That’s all I am asking for. Like Aretha Franklin. Who is that? Never mind. Bad joke. I said, never mind. She was a singer. Sang a song about respect. Yes, that one. Yes, yes. I prefer to use the term African-American but have it your way. You sent the picture? I haven’t received anything. It was a video? Well, that’s going to take fucking forever. While I’m waiting for that to download, what is our next turn? This road is blocked by what appears to be a pile of burned cars. We’re still going to the elementary school, right? Yes, I understand it’s no longer a school. Okay, then Google Maps should still get us there. Hang on, I’m going to take the phone away from my head for a few seconds—I think the video came through and I need to take the phone away from my head so I can watch it. I won’t be able to hear you. Don’t hang up. Stand by.”

  Pete lowered the phone into the sweet spot of his reading spectacles an
d wrestled fruitlessly with its UI, which had been terrible twenty years ago. He caught Sophia trying to sneak a peek and actually flinched as he angled the phone away from her. The video had no soundtrack except for the hugger-mugger of prairie wind buffeting a microphone. Sophia had copped a brief glimpse but it hadn’t been what she’d expected and so she was still trying to make sense of it. She’d expected an unshaven Methodist zip-tied to a lawn chair, or something of that genre, but instead had seen a weird silhouette against bright sky, foreshortened and stretched out in a way that triggered a memory she couldn’t quite nail down.

  “We’re good to go,” Pete announced, clapping the phone back to his head. “Yes, Joseph, I already told you we have the Wet Wipes. All one hundred pounds. Spring Breeze. Like you asked for. Okay. Okay. See you there, Joseph.”

  Pete hung up and then noticed Sophia looking at him strangely. “Joseph has hemorrhoids,” he explained.

  Apparently a key part of the ceremony was that Pete had to go to where this Joseph character was currently hanging out and deliver the Wet Wipes and have a beer with him. Joseph’s base of operations turned out to be a former school on the edge of an abandoned town. The playground had become an RV encampment ringed by portable toilets that were no longer portable in that they’d been hooked up to a system of PVC pipes that ran over the ground without any clear destination; they must have led somewhere but the terrain was so flat it wasn’t obvious which way gravity would take them. The school building proper was occupied by people of higher status. Joseph must have been in there somewhere. But Sophia would never actually know. For, being female, she was not invited. Upon arrival she was trotted out like a homecoming queen at a Rotary Club meeting and introduced at a great distance. Then she got back in the SUV, which bucked and clunked as the trailer was detached from it and simply abandoned in a parking space that was still marked, in weathered paint, as being reserved for the school nurse. Sophia never got to meet the hemorrhoid-plagued chieftain or to see his lair. But Pete came back out half an hour later smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and Bud Light. In one hand he was carrying a bouquet of locally sourced ditch daisies, which he handed off to Sophia—apparently a token of Joseph’s esteem for the warlady. Then he peeled off a pair of blue nitrile gloves he’d pulled on before getting out of the car “because you never know about residues.” He fastidiously turned these inside out and then used one of them to withdraw from his shirt pocket a new cell phone that was displaying a map. “Let’s roll,” he said. “Our guy is five point seven three miles away and was alive and conscious thirty minutes ago when they put him up.”